


Barnum Effect

by michigun



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28036059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/michigun/pseuds/michigun
Summary: It all starts like this: Quentin meets a street magician.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Эффект Барнума](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28031562) by [michigun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/michigun/pseuds/michigun). 



> So, yeah, basically it's a translation of my own story that I'm writing in Russian. It's somewhat canon compliant in ways I'm not gonna disclose rn, but I hope you like it!
> 
> Keep in mind that English is NOT my first language, so it's probably gonna be funny at times. Anyway, let me know what you think! Thnx!

It all starts like this: Quentin goes to his postgrad interview (in fact, he is already late), he scrolls through possible questions in his head and re-reads his motivation letter for the thousandth time, realizing that, of course, he remembers it by heart, but this is unlikely to help if he has a panic attack. He is a little sick of the fluttering of letters, he does not look where he is going, so it is absolutely expected that he bumps into someone — he is still in New York, and an inattentive cyclist should have knocked him down about twenty minutes ago. He looks up: a small, dense crowd is blocking the sidewalk, and some incredibly attractive guy rises above it, he’s wearing eyeliner, his curls are carelessly disheveled, and he smiles a little indulgently. And then something flares up, the crowd gasps in unison, people applaud, and the guy laughs hypnotizingly softly.  
“I’m not done yet,” he promises, and Quentin doesn’t even notice how he squeezes through the crowd, how he thoughtlessly apologizes for stepping on someone’s feet — and ends up right in front of him.  
“I need a volunteer,” the guy says, and then catches his eyes and smiles. “What’s your name?”  
“Mine?” Quentin asks stupidly. He’s still very much late, and he needs to run for the interview. The guy’s eyes are of dark gold, and his nod is completely regal. “Quentin.”  
“Come, Quentin,” the guy holds out his open hand. “Please, think of a card. Don’t tell me.”  
Quentin knows this trick, of course, but he thinks of a card anyway — let it be a six of diamonds.  
“Think about your card, Quentin,” the magician leans to his ear, “think hard. Imagine it in the palm of your hand, imagine putting it in your wallet and hiding your wallet in your pocket.”  
Quentin tries, but that’s not what he imagines. The magician smells of incense and flowers, and it’s a little suffocating.  
“Get out your wallet,” the magician suggests, pressing his side against him for a moment.  
Quentin fumbles through his pockets, but there is no wallet. His hands instantly turn cold, and he hastily looks around.  
“Um. I...”  
“You,” the magician suddenly turns on his heels and points to someone in the crowd. “What’s your name?”  
“Janet,” a short girl with long dark hair responds warily.  
“Janet, check your purse.”  
The girl rummages through her clutch for several long seconds and finally fishes out a tattered gray wallet. Quentin feels a little dizzy.  
“What card did you think of, Quentin?” The magician leans towards him again, and Quentin thinks that the crowd around them shouldn’t even be able to hear his voice.  
“A six of diamonds,” Quentin mutters. The magician must have pulled the wallet out of his pocket.  
“Janet, please open the wallet.”  
Janet slowly pulls the six of diamonds out of the wallet and shows it to the crowd.

“They must’ve thought I was an actor,” Quentin says twenty minutes later, when the magician finishes his performance, the crowd disperses and they are left alone on the sidewalk.  
“Sometimes you do magic for only one person,” the magician says absently. “Sorry, did you want something?”  
He glances briefly somewhere over Quentin’s shoulder, but quickly looks back.  
“How did you do this?” It comes out more demanding than Quentin planned to say.  
“The first rule of magic is never to reveal your secrets,” the magician smiles coolly at him. “And now I beg your pardon, I have to go.”  
He turns around, clutching a small leather suitcase in his hands, and takes a couple of steps away.  
“Can I buy you coffee?” Quentin says, unexpectedly even for himself.  
The magician pauses and looks at him over his shoulder.  
“Eliot.”  
“What?”  
“My name is Eliot. Come on, I’ve got ten minutes.”

Eliot drinks black coffee without sugar and is able to sit in a low Starbucks chair as if it were a real throne.  
“I know a few card tricks,” Quentin says, feeling a panicky stutter down his throat. “Including those where you have to guess a card, a couple of them even, but you did nothing with the deck, and I...”  
Eliot slides his hand in front of him in a fluid motion, stopping the flow of words. Quentin grits his teeth.  
“I won’t tell you anyway,” Eliot says weightily. “But if you want to entertain me with a couple of tricks, be my guest.”  
He hands Quentin his deck — it is completely ordinary, the cards are not marked, just stylized: instead of spades, there are daggers, diamonds look like stars, long elongated hearts look like strangely shaped cups, and clubs are drawn as crosses.  
“Tarot,” Eliot says, as if it explains anything.  
Quentin shakes his head nervously. A simple trick. He needs to focus. He shuffles the cards with a soft rustle, then hands the deck to Eliot and looks at his hands with long fingers and a few heavy silver rings on them. When Eliot shuffles the deck, the cards seem to float for a moment. Quentin blinks hard.  
At the bottom of the deck, he remembers this, is the king of hearts.  
“Pull out any card and memorize it,” Quentin asks, and Eliot obediently draws the card, gently turns it towards him and nods.  
“Done.”  
“Now put it at the very bottom of the deck.”  
Eliot smiles at him as he does this. A simple trick. Quentin learned it the very first day he decided he would become a great magician.  
Quentin splits the deck in half, and the cards from the bottom — the king of hearts and the Eliot’s one — get somewhere in the middle. He repeats this several times, mentally tracking where their cards should now have gone.  
“Now I’ll find it,” he promises, palms sweating sharply. He has done this trick dozens of times, but he worries as if he’s twelve again and he’s showing it to Julia for the first time.  
He smoothly fans out the cards on a low table and for several seconds, runs his palm over the backs that merge into one canvas. They depict a dark green interlacing of branches — as if in the thicket of an enchanted forest. Quentin feels like he is falling through. Finally, he picks up the outermost card with his finger, turns the entire fan in one showy movement and catches the king of hearts with his eyes. The very middle of the fan. Eliot’s card peeps out from under it — it turns out to be the king of clubs.  
Quentin puts on a small show — he almost pulls this card out of the fan, but freezes, pays attention to the card at the very end, slowly shakes his head, as if in deep thought. Looks up at Eliot — Eliot looks back at him with unexpected warmth.  
“Is that your card?” Quentin asks finally, holding out the king of clubs, and Eliot briefly claps his hands.  
“It was extremely sweet,” he admits and takes the card from his fingers. “May I?”  
Quentin nods, bewildered, and Eliot puts the card back in the fan, then turns the fan face down again in a familiar deft movement.  
“Abra,” he muses with a smile, “cadabra. Please, add a bit of your magic.”  
Quentin holds his hand stiffly over the fan and laughs awkwardly.  
“Thank you, dear colleague.”  
When Eliot reveals all the cards in the fan with the same slick movement, the deck consisting entirely of kings of clubs is laid out in front of Quentin. In the very middle of it lies the lonely king of hearts, and Eliot pushes the card at Quentin.  
“You can take it as a keepsake.”  
“How...”  
“It’s a secret.”  
“I watched your hands, you did nothing...”  
“I have to go, Quentin. Thanks for the coffee.”  
And this is surprising, yet to some extent completely expected: his number is written on the card.

Quentin decides to write to him only a few days later. He doesn’t think of anything better than, “Hi, this is Quentin. Do you remember me? ♣”, and even this takes so much of his nerves that for some time he does not think that he blew his postgraduate interview simply by not showing up.  
The answer comes in a few minutes, and at first Quentin feels a wave of monstrous bashful heat, because the first thing he sees is a heart emoji at the end of the message. But it is not a heart emoji — it’s a sign of hearts.  
“hello, quentin. of course I remember. you took your time ♥”  
For a while they text aimlessly: Quentin lies that he’s been busy, but now he’s got a couple of free days, and Eliot says that he’s been busy as well with his gigs, but, what a coincidence, he’s got one or two free evenings, too.  
Quentin stares at this message for about ten minutes, and that’s how Julia finds him.  
“What’s up?” She asks carefully. It seems sometimes, that his failure to enter postgrad school upset her much more than it affected him.  
“Nothing,” Quentin says quickly, and types, trying desperately not to misspell, “If you haven’t planned anything for your free evening yet, can we go somewhere?”  
Then he locks the phone, hides it under the sofa cushion and exhales slowly and loudly.  
“Okay, that wasn’t weird at all,” Julia says, puzzled.  
Quentin hears an incoming message and presses the phone down with the cushion.  
“It’s just,” he mutters, feeling his face go red. “Just...”  
“Just ...” Julia prompts and sits down next to him. “Q, who did you text to?”  
Quentin is stubbornly silent, staring ahead. On the wall hangs a tattered poster of Fillory.  
“Okay.” Julia pats him gently on the head. “Will you tell me later?”  
The problem is that on the one hand, there is nothing to tell, but on the other, it’s stupidly awkward. He somehow did not have a reason to come out to Julia, although he sometimes caught himself thinking that she had known everything for a long time and did not say anything so as not to embarrass him. And this moment where it seems that it is too late to come out? Yeah, Quentin lives in it now.  
And it’s not like he was dating any guys. And it’s not like he’s dating now — it’s just a couple of drinks with a street magicians, and the magician didn’t agree yet.  
“I will,” Quentin promises finally and blindly fumbles under the cushion. He is dying of excitement and curiosity, and so far — of a vague joyful anticipation. Eliot has to agree, right? Why else would he give Quentin his number.  
On the edges of the poster, he observes distractedly, there is a dark green interlacing of branches. Just like on the back of Eliot’s cards.

“i know a nice bar. how about tomorrow?”  
Quentin rereads the message for a third time. His heart beats somewhere in his throat, and he types “Yes, great. 8PM? Send me the address”, and then deletes it and tries again. “Tomorrow’s ok. What’s the name of the bar?” and deletes it again. He wants to seem laid back, but feels that all the words stiflingly lay on top of each other. He recalls Eliot sitting in an uncomfortable chair, too soft and too low, as if he were doing all of Starbucks a great honor by his mere presence.  
If he looks at the image of the king of hearts on the card for a long enough time, he can see Eliot in the black curls of his hair and the line of his nose. Quentin rubs the digits of his number with his finger, hides the card in his breast pocket, and finally texts, “I’ll pick you up. Send your address.”  
It’s stupid because he plans to take a taxi because he doesn’t have his own car (because driving his own car in New York is stupid), but he likes the way this text looks. Eliot sends him the address and tells him that he will be waiting for him at eight.

When Quentin gets out of the taxi (he is slightly nauseated by the smell of his own eau de toilette, which he nervously poured on himself before leaving), Eliot flicks his cigarette butt aside, takes two wide steps towards him and kisses him unceremoniously. They do not go to the bar — Quentin barely manages to blindly wave the taxi off, after which he immediately grabs the collar of Eliot’s shirt with nervous fingers and hurries to kiss him back.  
“If you still want a drink, then I have brandy, gin, some wine, and even beer,” Eliot says against his lips.  
Quentin nods dazedly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So far so good.

Quentin feels positively fucked. His whole body aches pleasantly, his head is blessedly empty, the bites burn on his neck and shoulders — he pulls the edge of the blanket over his face when the midday sun breaks through the curtains and makes an indistinct hoarse sound. The smell of scrambled eggs and toasted bread comes from somewhere.  
“Coffee with milk?” Says a voice above him, and Quentin peers out from under the covers with one eye.  
Eliot walks around the apartment in an embroidered silk robe over his naked body. He has a plate of toast in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and he looks about as satisfied with life as Quentin feels right now.  
“And two spoons of sugar,” Quentin mumbles, realizing with horror that his voice is indeed hoarse.  
“Barbaric,” Eliot notes with affection. “Get up. No food in bed.”  
“What time is it?” Quentin asks, trying unsuccessfully to catch his briefs from the floor without changing his position on the bed.  
“Time is an illusion,” Eliot sighs wisely and throws a t-shirt on the bed next to Quentin. This is definitely not Quentin’s t-shirt, and it looks completely alien among all Eliot’s clothes, but Quentin puts it on anyway and triumphantly pulls on the briefs he finally found. “If only you are in a hurry?”  
Quentin feels absolutely happy, without exaggeration, when he shakes his head in response.

Eliot lives in a spacious loft filled with mismatched furniture — Quentin sees three comfortable sofas on which you can recline with your legs stretched out, and four armchairs of different shapes. Eliot has a huge bed with a pile of pillows and a few comforters, mirrors are hang everywhere, and bottles of spirits and dusty trinkets sit on bookshelves among frayed and untouched spines. Crystals and heavy pendants are scattered on one of the coffee tables, several rings lie on a saucer next to them. Quentin glances over all this, thinking for some reason of a dragon’s cave or royal chambers — because of the thick curtains and dark upholstery, the apartment seems to be immersed in shadows.  
Eliot puts out his cigarette in the ashtray. Quentin gazes at the familiar spine — the first book about Fillory, torn from its sisters by a half-empty bottle of whiskey, is on the shelf so close that he doesn’t hesitate to reach out and smooth it out with his finger.  
“Have you read them?”  
“Margo made me,” Eliot says lazily. “She loves these books.”  
“Margo?” Quentin asks. There are no photographs in the apartment. For some reason he was sure that there would be at least a couple  
“My...” Eliot pauses, looking for a word, “family. The greatest woman in this and several neighboring universes.”  
Quentin laughs softly.

In this dark, warm apartment, time stretches and folds in heavy rings, and Quentin does not feel its movement. It feels like they are both frozen in amber. He and Eliot are perched on a green velvet sofa with wooden armrests, Quentin is straddling him, and Eliot is idly stroking his back. Eliot’s robe lies on the floor in artistic folds. They’ve been kissing for so long that Quentin’s jaw aches a little, but he doesn’t complain — everything that’s been happening to him from the moment he first met Eliot’s gaze feels like the rightest, the most magical concatenation of circumstances.  
“I was supposed to be interviewed for postgrad school,” he says for some reason, breathlessly.  
“Mm.” Eliot bites down on his collarbone. “Today? Now?”  
“No, that...” Quentin momentarily forgets how words work and blinks hard several times. “That day. When we met.”  
Eliot says nothing, and Quentin agrees with him.  
“For fuck’s sake, Waugh.”  
Quentin rolls off Eliot’s lap in a panic and looks around: in the middle of the room, looking as he was sprayed with a lemon in his face, there is a stranger. Quentin does not get how he appeared here so quietly, and now, frankly, there’s not enough blood rushing to his head to try to understand it.  
“And that’s why,” Eliot calmly rises from the sofa, picks up a robe from the floor and helps Quentin to his feet, “you need to warn about a visit in advance and not show up without an invitation. Don’t make me think you are doing this on purpose.”  
Quentin lowers himself carefully to the edge of the sofa and covers himself with an embroidered pillow. Eliot pours brandy (for himself only) and waves a hand between them vaguely.  
“Quentin — Penny — Penny — Quentin — pleased to meet you — mutual — sorry, wasn’t planning on bothering you — it’s fine, have a good one.” He pauses briefly and raises an eyebrow. “Penny?”  
“I need a belt,” Penny says slowly, looking somewhere toward the kitchen table. There are plates of half-eaten scrambled eggs.  
Eliot exhales loudly in annoyance and rolls his eyes.  
“And that’s why you’re ruining my perfect Saturday morning?”  
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”  
“Perfect Saturday morning,” Eliot repeats distinctly, and waves his hand toward a huge cabinet with carved doors. “Bottom shelf on the right. And next time, use the door.”  
“It was locked,” Penny suddenly turns to Quentin and winks at him with a wry smile. Quentin can physically sense how slowly his brain is working now.  
Penny pulls an incomprehensible device out of Eliot’s closet — it really seems to be worn on a belt, but it looks so massive and bulky that Quentin can hardly imagine where it can be used.  
“Props,” Eliot explains, following his gaze. “Penny is a magician too.”  
Penny responds with an unrestrained barking laugh and salutes Quentin.  
“Oh yeah baby. A damn good one.”  
“Weren’t you in a hurry?” Eliot’s smile is deceptively soft, and he makes an incomprehensible pass with his hands, fingers intertwining tightly. Penny holds out his palms. He has a charming, if openly mocking smile, and this time he winks at Eliot.  
“Have you already shown him all your tricks?”  
“Was just about to show him how to make a corpse disappear.”  
They bicker like this for a while, while Quentin, trying to be invisible and quiet, pulls on at least his pants. Finally, Penny’s voice rings out in the hallway for the last time, and after that, Quentin is relieved to hear the sound of the front door closing.  
“How did he come in so quietly?” He mutters, grabbing the glass of brandy from Eliot. Eliot shrugs as if it worries him the least in the world. Instead of answering, he turns Quentin to himself, hooks his fingers under the belt of his jeans and asks in a bad pornographic voice where they stopped.

Quentin returns home Sunday afternoon. He did not pay attention to the exact moment at which his phone died, but when he turns it on, a flurry of notifications about missed calls, voice messages, and nervous texts falls on him. Dad, Julia, and even Julia’s fiancé. Quentin is slightly nauseous from a flash of anxiety: he does not like the idea of urgently calling everyone and assuring them that he is alive, so he replies with a short message: “I’m fine. The phone went dead when I was with friends.”  
Julia calls him immediately, and he realizes how badly he missed: he has no friends that she doesn’t know about. (One could say that he just has no friends, but he is trying to wean himself from negative thinking).  
“We were worried,” she explains softly but insistently. “Q, when was the last time you texted me? Friday afternoon? And after that, you just disappeared.”  
“I met them at the interview,” Quentin says reluctantly. “They invited me to their party, and I don’t know, I just agreed, because I had no plans, and in the end it didn’t completely suck.”  
Julia is silent for a while.  
“Q,” she sounds suddenly alarmed. “Is everything all right? Nothing happened?”  
“Jesus, Jules,” he wants to laugh, but something tingles in his eyes and nose. “Everything’s fine. We barely even drank, just... hung out? Nothing bad.”  
When he thinks about what he and Eliot have been up to most of the time, his neck and face get terribly hot. He still lets out a short, rattling laugh.  
“They are very nice guys. Uh... Margo, Penny, and Eliot.” He knows he’s doing this on purpose — he deliberately hides Eliot’s name at the very end so that Julia doesn’t pay attention to it. So that she doesn’t hear his voice shaking a little.  
“Margo,” Julia repeats weightily, and Quentin rolls his eyes at his nervous, radiant reflection in the mirror. Several bright hickeys are burning on his neck.  
“It’s not like that at all.”  
“If you say so.”

The next couple of weeks are filled with the best sex of Quentin’s life. Eliot is absolutely shameless, always hungry and seems to know better than Quentin himself what Quentin likes. They meet in bars, go for walks, they even brunch together, but inevitably end up in bed. Or in a bar restroom, or in that remote, distant corner of the park where they aren’t afraid of bumping into runners and dogs, or on a creaking sofa in Quentin’s living room.  
From time to timeб Quentin shows card tricks to Eliot, because Eliot reminds him of this himself and always watches his hands with vague tender affection. Eliot didn’t show him anything after that trick with a full deck of kings.  
“Do you perform on stage?” Quentin asks at the end of the second week, his head on Eliot’s chest, his eyes half-closed. He’s trying to stay awake, but the rhythmic beating of Eliot’s heart soothes him.  
“Sometimes.” Eliot flexes his neck uncomfortably to kiss the top of his head. “Less often now. What, did you want to become my assistant?”  
They both laugh softly and Quentin says that yes, he always dreamed of standing on stage in a tiny dress and fishnet stockings.  
“You have a peculiar idea of assistant work,” Eliot muses softly. He’s almost asleep himself, his hand on Quentin’s shoulders relaxed and heavy.  
“I just wanted to see you on stage,” Quentin says a little awkwardly. He tried to find the magician Eliot Waugh on YouTube, looked in all sorts of combinations — “street performance”, “card tricks”, at least something, but Eliot literally does not exist on the Internet.  
“We can arrange it.”  
But Quentin is already asleep.

The problem is that Julia began to notice: his frequent absence, hasty excuses, immodest marks on his neck and sometimes on his wrists. He still collects missed calls from her in the morning and tries to avoid her wordless, questioning looks, but it gets more and more difficult.  
“When will you introduce us?” She asks, scooping up the last of the cheese popcorn from the bottom of the bowl. They are still in the middle of the Star Wars marathon, and food supplies have already run out.  
“To whom?” Quentin takes a quick glance at the phone set to Do Not Disturb and hides it under the pillow.  
Instead of answering, Julia looks pointedly at the pillow and raises an eyebrow. Quentin wants to hide under the blanket.  
“It’s not quite serious,” he says finally, when the credits stop flying through space, and he suddenly feels a little shitty about himself. “We’re just. Uh.”  
“Quentin,” Julia looks at him with an incomprehensible expression of pride, playful indignation, and some awkwardness. “You are the last person I could’ve suspected of friendship with benefits.”  
Quentin tries to smile back (it turns out crooked). No, Julia is certainly not the problem. The problem is that what’s happening between him and Eliot can hardly be called friendship — there are only benefits at best.  
The problem is that this is not enough for him.


End file.
